A Linkbuilding Method So Effective I Can't Believe It's Not&nbspBlackhat

The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz.

An alternative title for this would be "Tom's Headsmacking Linkbuilding Tip #1," but I'm not sure this will be a whole series so I'm going to play it safe with a title which doesn't force me to come up with these ideas on a regular basis. I know, I'm lazy. Bite me!

Talking of being lazy - I'm always looking for ways to jumpstart linkbuilding campaigns and cut corners, and if my knowledge of the human race is accurate then the rest of you are too. This is backed up by Rand's recent post on which parts of SEO everyone finds hardest. The vast majority of you said external link acquisition is the hardest for you.

That's why today I'm presenting a get-rich-quick linkbuilding tactic which actually works across virtually any niche. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well, it's not. Here's how it's done. Oh, and by the way, it's 100% whitehat :-)

The basic principle is this:

Find pages or sites which used to offer a service and no longer do

As soon as I had this idea I did a Google search for no longer available and I spotted ranking 4th the BBC Antiques page, which is the pagerank 6 antiques page on the BBC site.....WHICH NO LONGER OFFERS ANY ANTIQUES CONTENT. When I saw this page I knew instantly that this idea was going to be killer and would find me a LOT of quality links.

Before I detail how to find pages like this, let me explain how you use them for linkbuilding (if it isn't immediately obvious!). There are two basic ways you can use these pages for linkbuilding if you have a site which is in the same niche:

Contact the owner of the page/site and request that they add a link to your (still live and active site!) from their page which no longer offers the service. It's a win for the site owner as they provide a useful page to any of their users who find the page and it's a win for you because, well, did you see my comment about the page being PR6?

Do a link analysis on the page to find all those sites who think they're linking to a useful page and contact them saying "Hi, I notice you link to the BBC antiques page. I'm not sure if you're aware but they stopped offering this service. I was wondering if you'd like to link to my antiques site instead as this is a lively and active web 2.0 antiques site with social voting and wardrobes." Wondering how effective this is? Well that BBC page has 1044 links (not to mention the other pages in that folder).

So this is all very well and good, but what happens if you don't run an antiques site? In that case you need to start thinking outside the box and constructing some more creative queries. (By the way, if anyone does run an antiques website and gets some use out of this then I'd love to hear from you, so please drop me a line or leave a comment down below.) Thankfully, here's some I made earlier:

For finding sites which no longer offer a service or have expired:

"service no longer available"

"service no longer available" [keyword]

"service no longer available" inurl:.ac.uk (or inurl:.edu for all you foreigners)

"no longer available [keyphrase]"

"site no longer available"

"site no longer available" [keyphrase]

"site has been taken down"

"site has been taken down" [keyphrase]

For finding sites which no longer sell a specific product:

"no longer offer [keyword]"

"no longer sell [keyword]"

"stopped selling [keyword]"

"stopped offering [keyword]"

The trick to using these effectively is to mine their backlinks for people who link to them looking for that product - this can be more time consuming but very, very worthwhile. Remember how hard it is to build links directly to your product page normally!

Anyway - you get the idea. It's not hard to follow this methodology to produce a whole bunch more queries and niches to look in to find your own links.

It's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between this tactic and the practice of buying sites for SEO. This method is more time consuming but cheaper and doesn't come with the risks associated with buying sites. Still, the methodologies for finding the sites can be quite similar and a lot has already been said on that topic by such luminaries as Shoemoney, Aaron Wall & QuadsZilla, so be sure to check out that info. Also, see Tamar's recap of the SMX Advanced session for more solid tips.

By the way - anyone who's a PRO member should head on over and read this pro tip which contains power tips, examples of sites I've found, and how to apply this thinking to blogs. If you're not a PRO member, what are you waiting for?

About TomCritchlow — Tom Critchlow is VP Operations for Distilled's new NYC office. Fiercely curious about life and passionate about learning new things.

I love the post and its an awesome way to really build up strong backlinks, from weathered pages.

I am going to share something similar - Geocities - (remember those?) I use to hunt links from Geocities sites that are no longer active - with the parent domain at PR 9 and top 100 pages at above PR 5...

The only problem is often webmasters are difficult to deal with, or hard to locate for such pages...

Manual link building is, well, manual. But this at least helps to improve the odds a little.

I'd also recommend using the intitle: operator on your target product/service keyword. Chances are, the title hasn't been changed, just a message on the page. Finding pages with the target term in the title will be even stronger, more likely to rank on their own (thereby sending you indirect traffic if you are getting a link on the page), and send a stronger signal about your page that is being linked to.

Similar to this is to search for keywords (without the "no longer" focus) that are related and complementary to what you have to offer. In this case, you may find sites that don't offer what you are offering and are not competitors. Or those who, like this technique focuses on, no longer offer it.

Thanks for all the comments and thumbs guys - glad to know you're appreciating the post!

For those of you not having much success with the tip - hope you can find something eventually. It took me a fair amount of digging to come up with relevant ones for our clients but the pages I found in the end were definitely worth it.

Ideas like this are exaclty why any Director should approve the Pro mebership fee for all of their SEO staff. Now just make it so I can pay for it with PayPal and you've got another 4 Pro Membership subscriptions headed your way.

For those of you non-creative types, don't waste your time trying to think outside of the box, just keep mozing. It'll be more productive for you.Now I'm off to find downed widgets to move in on!Good Stuff,BT

I didn't read all the comments - you know an oldish post is really good if that becomes unfeasible:I wanted to say that this idea is as whitehat as it gets IMO: cleaning up the internet's broken links by asking people to review and make a choice about whether to add your link instead: some people will say "thanks for letting me know, I'll fix that but I won't add your link because of X." I have found links with this method and done a quick revamp of some of my content before going after them to make sure that I have the best chance of getting it.

Nice tip...but I'm wondering if anyone has had any success in their niche? Haven't had any luck in mine so far. Perhaps, as a loose definition, let's say success is obtaining a link from more than one site with PR of 5 or above.

ive read that yeah if it is really obvious that google resets the domain value to zero. can't remember exactly where i read that but i think matt cutts mentioned it

EDIT:

"On expired domains, Matt said Google tries to reset pagerank/links for all expired domains to zero when they are registered by someone new. They don’t try to penalize the expired domain, but they also don’t want to give credit for the previous owner’s links."

This post made me think about other ways you can harness incomplete or obsolete websites. If you want to find more than just link bait...maybe a couple new projects, just search "under construction" or "site under construction". Solicit your services and see what happens.

thanks for sharing this tip, i went off and made some searches for two of my clients to see whether i could find something valuable, i made about 10 searches and couldnt help feeling a very cheeky about it... anyway i didnt come up with anything worth spending time in the niche areas i searched, but i can see the point in doing this... cheers

Great to see an article like this , does anyone use trackbacks ?? Totally backwards from what we marketers and seo's from the mid to late 90’s learned about linking to or even mentioning competition on our sales page. But there in lies the difference, all we had back then were sales pages, no content, no free information, nothing but pitch. Nowadays its quite a different story, web 2.0 demands we flip everything we know about linking upside down and do the exact opposite of what we learned starting out. To this day it is weird to me to link to competitors or people I overlap with considerably. But I do willingly and with 99% glee, because it brings 35% of my first time visitors back to my site according to my stats.... great post

I know this post is a little crusty at this point, but reading through I see a bunch of people had difficulty with this link acquisition strategy. Has it worked for anyone here? I would be interested to hear of your experiences...

[quote] Contact the owner of the page/site and request that they add a link to your (still live and active site!) from their page which no longer offers the service[/quote]

I did think of one thing though if the site is no longer operating, then one would think they would not want to link to you - I mean most "dead" sites I find are just that - dead - non active, no one home ?

Thanks Tom. Will start working on this idea and see how it goes. In your opinion Tom, what would you considered to be productive on a link buiding campaign? Let's say you hired a link builder and he reports on a week 2 related, PR6 links with few links on that page. Would you say that's productive? How to meassure that? Thanks again.

This is an awesome post. I'm always looking for new inventive ways to build links and get out of the redundancy and routine of it all. This is definately a technique that I feel will not only be valuable, but probably also more successful that some efforts.

It pains me to do it, but I agree with Tom - these are relevant links from sites that are probably eager to link to you. Plus, from a user perspective, you're taking a resource that's broken or defunct and replacing it with something useful.

I second here - these are quality links and not SPAM.. You are encouraging old content to be replaced by new, more relevant content - and is beneficial from a users point of view as well, and great for search engines because then they dont need to worry about "dead" pages, because they are now back in use...

Thanks guys for making that clear, I see the concept. I have a question:

In your opinion, what would you considered to be productive on a link buiding campaign? Let's say you hired a link builder and he reports on a week 2 related, PR6 links with few links on that page. Would you say that's productive? How to meassure link building productivity in terms of quantity and quality? Thanks again.

I agree with Tom_C, Dr. Pete and rishil. This process saves the search engines the trouble of having to identify and potentially remove the dead pages.

The search user also benefits greatly from being referred to newer and potentially better content. This also reflects well on the search engines, as it lessens the potential to inconvenience search users with results that are no longer useful and/or accurate. It's a win-win.

I found a BBC page from 2005 that asked for people to send in details of organisations to be listed on that page... Name of organisation, a two-line summary, telephone number, and web address. I sent in the details, and three days later they deleted the whole page from their site. The information they *did* have was all good, and now it isn't there at all.

While with some of these pages you can contact them directly and ask them to add a link on their page to your website in practice that's only one half of it (though look in the pro tip where I list a BBC page which actively ASKS you to send in related sites so they can link to them).

The real point of my post is that you don't need to contact the owner of the dead page - as that quite often is fruitless but instead you look at all the people who LINK to the dead page and ask THEM to amend their links or add a link to your site. This gives you so many more opportunities for link requests and you only need low conversion rate to make this very effective.

Hmm nice idea. This could work in any niche, that's the beauty of it!How about a more cheesy link building tactic?You register a domain with the same text as your competion with .co.uk or equivilant because they have .com. Then you contact all the inbound links to the .com site and tell them to change the link to point to .co.uk (where the new site resides...except it doesn't!)Only joking!

What a cunning idea...though my initial excitement has been dulled slightly by spending 30 minutes trying every variation and relevant keyword I could think off without any pot of gold suddenly appearing on my desk.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone else has success using this technique though.